


long on the road

by limerental



Series: Long on the Road [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Truckers, Angst, Emotionally Constipated Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Found Family, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia and Jaskier | Dandelion Go To The Coast, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Hippie Jaskier, M/M, Past Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Road Trips, Terminal Illnesses, Trucker Geralt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:48:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22882804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Geralt is a long-haul trucker who has recently broken it off (again) with his ex-wife. Jaskier is a free spirit musician hitchhiking across the country while grappling with a sudden reminder of his mortality. Geralt really, really regrets picking him up at the last rest area. Until, he doesn’t.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: Long on the Road [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914469
Comments: 139
Kudos: 586
Collections: Best Geralt





	long on the road

**Author's Note:**

> "write a cutesy trucker!au", I said. "it'll be be fun and brief and easy and not break my heart at all!" famous last words.
> 
> please heed the warnings. this is indeed a MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH fic. this might hurt.

_and I had no idea on what ground I was founded  
all of that goodness is going with you now  
then when I met you, my virtues uncounted  
all of my goodness is going with you now_

[shrike - hozier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwe1O29sfRY)

* * *

So, thing is, Geralt didn’t _do_ hitchhikers.

At least, not like he used to back when he first started driving, but even then, it wasn’t regular, he wasn’t one of those guys who picked up a different hooker at each truck stop, and he didn’t need the chatter of conversation to keep him awake through the long stretches of monotonous midnight highway.

And the culture had shifted at some point, gone mean and shifty.

Used to be, he could pick up some service member in uniform at a filling station and take him on to the next town, spend an hour or so shooting the shit about their time in the military, and part ways after a few exits with a grunt and a handshake. He’d pick up the odd free spirit or drifter if the mood struck and he was going their way. Once, he’d helped out some young couple trying to free love their way across the states and dumped them off in a motel parking lot after the girl kept trying to take her top off in the passenger seat, her man wrangling her back into it for a while until they got to kissing and that was enough of that.

But free love was dead, and the last serviceman he’d picked up was shifty-eyed and shivery, didn’t notice until the stranger was already up in the cab and away from the filling station that the gas can he had swinging in his hand didn’t have a drop in it, despite his claims that he just run out of gas, just needed a lift to his car back a ways. Geralt took his wallet down off the dash and tucked it in his front pocket and kept an eye on the man. A few miles down the road, his teeth started chattering, and the third time Geralt asked _hey buddy, so where’s your car at again?_ the stranger finally broke down and demanded he be let out on the side of the road and fled.

And half the reason Geralt got into trucking in the first place was the solitude. Yennefer travelled with him a few short years when they were freshly-married, but that ended quick with a bitter _”there’s enough fucking conflicting personalities in that truck with just you, don’t need more along for the ride._

So Geralt didn’t do hitchhikers.

But he’d just got off a long break through the winter and was fresh on the road going south from the terminal in Bangor. He’d picked up a load and was heading down to Portland, making shit time and with abysmal weather, the grey slurry of a downpour sluicing off the windshield. And that was just the job, he’d driven through worse a million times, but when he left the house yesterday morning, Yen took him by the arm on the front porch, just before he let the screendoor slam and said _maybe this is the last time. I think you don’t come back here again. That might be best for all of us._

It had been like that what felt like a dozen times, sure, but it had never been like _that_ , conversational instead of a screaming match, Yen’s voice even and sure, Geralt nodding, leaning to kiss her goodbye. Something about it felt real and final and genuine, like it would stick this time.

So when he pulled off to the rest area for shitty vending machine coffee and a piss and saw a young guy slumped snoozing on a bench outside the bathrooms with his guitar case in his lap and a little cardboard sign that said simply “looking for a lift”, well, he caved. Like a dumbass. Nudged the guy with his foot.

“Buddy, where you headed?”

The man blinked awake and straightened up, all blue-eyed and unfairly pretty for somebody wearing muddy steel-toe boots and a frayed jean jacket, sleeping on a rest area bench.

“Everywhere,” he said with a crooked smile, and Geralt grunted and agreed to a few hundred miles or so. The guy looked non-threatening enough, if a little greasy, but he didn’t smell ripe and Geralt could probably break him in half with one arm if he tried anything. He bought the man a coffee, least he could do, and let him follow out to the lot and clamber into the cab of his rig.

The guy was still groggy and quiet as Geralt slipped the truck into gear to rumble back out onto the highway. He looked very young to be out on the road alone, with a few wisps of scruff on his chin and his dark hair grown long around his ears and the back of his neck, both hands curled child-like around his flimsy coffee cup.

The quiet lasted about as long as it took the caffeine to kick in.

* * *

“I’m Jaskier,” said Jaskier. “You might have heard of me actually. Sang that one song a while back, you know the one.” He proceeded to sing the chorus to a song that Geralt had never heard. He said so, and Jaskier laughed. “Never? It was very popular. Topped the charts!”

“Don’t listen to much music,” Geralt said. He rarely clicked on the radio, preferring the silence of the open road, the hum of the wheels on rumble strips.

“It must be a hell of a life out here. All alone… the great expanse of the American highway before you… So what do you do to wile away the long hours? What keeps you going? What sustains you on these wild, open roads?”

“Thinking.”

“Thinking about?”

“Thinking about silence.”

Jaskier huffed but did not seem deterred.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

“Geralt,” said Geralt, and then couldn’t get a word in edgewise for the next dozen miles.

Not that he was particularly motivated to. He let the guy chatter over the squeak of the windshield wipers with nothing but occasional grunts to show he was listening. Yen used to say one of these days he’d come off a month and a half long stint for a week of home time and find he’d gone mute in the meanwhile and wouldn’t be able to pinpoint when on the road it had happened.

But she knew that wasn’t true, because in the decades they’d been doing things, he’d never missed their weekly call, once a week from any payphone he could find. He was always sure to be mindful of how late it was her time. After dinner so she’d had a touch of wine or brandy and slurred a little over the phone but not so late that she’d drunk herself to sleep yet.

Sometimes the line rang and rang, and he stood there in the phonebooth watching raindrops catch on each other on the glass and sometimes Ciri answered, small and sweet, and sometimes he ran late coming through traffic and had to call her the next night instead, but every Friday, he found a place to call and he dialed just like he’d promised he would.

There was a time it was hell to drag himself off the line, frantic to dig up more change to feed the machine just to hear her voice another ten minutes, another minute, another half a second. If he closed his eyes, he could smell her lilac perfume instead of the mildew stink of the truck stop. But then she’d say _“if you miss me so much, don’t go out on the road again. Find work up here. Something where you see your family more than once a month._

And he’d listened sometimes, he’d put in notice to the trucking company, gone up north, moved into Yen’s house in Maine and gotten local work. Work where he could drive Ciri to the bus stop each morning and kiss her forehead at night. But it would always end with his shit flung out on the lawn one night, Yen howling from the porch, and he’d head back onto the road.

* * *

Geralt didn’t do hitchhikers, and he was quickly remembering why.

Jaskier was loud and precocious and kicked his feet up on the dash and asked to stop off somewhere to use the bathroom every few exits and warbled into song at a moment’s notice. He had a clear, strong singing voice that didn’t seem to quit even after hours of use. He sang folk songs and pub songs and sea shanties and some of his own compositions, and Geralt couldn’t really say that it was unpleasant to listen to but he also couldn’t hear himself think.

He usually spent most days on the road just sitting and thinking, sometimes daydreaming, sometimes remembering. Sometimes he talked to his truck, a low, affectionate murmuring. _Let me tell you,_ he’d say to his brick-red hulking mess of a rig. _Ain’t a better life than this, truly. Just you, me, and the road._

With Yen in the cab those few years, it had felt claustrophobic, penned in, miserable. He didn’t do passengers anymore. Not short-term, not long-term.

When the last delivery of the day took a long ass time unloading and left him way out in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire long past dark, Geralt pulled the truck off onto a gravel turnaround on the side of a rural two lane road and cut the engine. His next pickup was out this way but not until morning, no use trying to find some place closer to civilization to wait out the night.

“Guess I’m stuck with you for the night, kid,” he said.

He woke in the grey light of dawn sprawled on the narrow bunk behind the cab, the kid snoring curled up in the passenger seat. Noisy even in a dead sleep.

By the time he’d run through his pre-trip check, knocked on the tires, checked lights and connections, squinted at gauges, Jaskier was up and yawning, cheek lined pink from the seam of the seat.

“Where to today, boss?” he asked.

“Pickup,” said Geralt. “Then breakfast.” _Then we drop you off somewhere and you’re on your way._

Except, after a pile of eggs and bacon and toast at a greasy diner on the edge of town, Jaskier asked if he could go along longer.

“No,” said Geralt. If he didn’t do hitchhikers, he _certainly_ didn’t do longer term road companions.

“Just a little while,” he said. “You won’t even notice I’m there!”

“Unlikely.”

“Come on, Geralt, I’ve got nowhere to go. And your life’s got the makings of a truly awesome ballad. A man on the outskirts of society, an unsung hero, a goddamn--”

“Shut it,” he growled, and Jaskier’s hands tightened on the strap of his guitar case, unruly hair blowing in a chill, spring wind. Something about his expression, the youthful stubbornness, the slight pout was jarringly familiar, the same look his daughter, Ciri, gave him when she knew she’d get her way. She was graduating from high school this year and going off to study law but still seemed far too pudgy with baby fat for such a thing, too gullible, too gentle. Jaskier looked like that, something easily taken advantage of.

This diner was not far from a major junction on the interstate and he’d be bound to find someone willing to take him along, but not everybody these days was as good-intentioned as Geralt.

He sighed, deep and long. “Fine. Get in the truck before I change my mind.”

* * *

Geralt also didn’t _do_ hitchhikers.

Main reason being, the sleeper bunk behind the cab didn’t have enough room for more athletic activities, being just a slab of padded mattress raised behind the front seats, a porthole in the back wall letting in a sliver of light. Not that it couldn’t be done, of course, but with a palpable risk of forgetting the close quarters and nearly braining yourself on the roof if you got a bit too enthusiastic. Not so enticing for first time encounters and only mildly tolerable for established connections.

That said, Ciri had been conceived in a rig not so unlike this one, so there was something to be said for the allure of a quick, cramped tumble after a long day on the road.

He’d never taken a hooker into the truck either, keeping that sort of union to threadbare motels and truck stop bathrooms only, but some guys had a different girl in their truck every night, sometimes the career type who stalked truck stops seeking out lonely men on the road and sometimes a runaway or a thrillseeker with nothing to offer but her body in payment for picking her up.

But Geralt? Not him, no sense in sullying the sanctity of his home away from home (or if he and Yen were in one of their ruts, his only home) with an uncomfortable, meaningless lay.

Geralt also did not _do_ hitchhikers, because it was messy and risky and not worth the trouble. And he especially did not do hitchhikers like Jaskier, no matter how prettily his eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks in sleep or his cheeks colored up when he bellowed out the lyrics of yet another silly song about the open road and the evening sky and the rolling mountains.

He didn’t do men, for one. Certain shenanigans involving some fellow soldiers overseas during the war notwithstanding. Every man got up to those sorts of things when there was a war on. Just body chemistry and brotherly camaraderie and all that.

And that was also not to say he wasn’t attracted to men. He had eyes and a healthy imagination and a strong libido. Just never did anything about it. Just wasn’t done.

He didn’t do hitchhikers, but Jaskier had somehow morphed from that into something of a travel companion. Every so often Geralt asked if he wanted to part ways at the next stop and was always answered with determined refusal. The little bastard kept clinging on for dear life. Geralt didn’t have the heart to shake him.

Also.

He looked real good fresh out of the showers at truck stops, wet hair dampening the collar of his grey t-shirt, and he always smelled fresh, some cologne he wore, sweet like a breeze off a hay field. He had this way about him, a hitch to his smile, an imperfect sort of beauty. He opened his mouth and said the stupidest bullshit, whatever sprung to mind, but in the meantime, he was alluring, he drew Geralt’s eyes anywhere he strayed, he was the worst kind of temptation.

Biggest problem being that he was _too goddamn young for him_. Looked hardly out of school. Had a dizzyingly naive view of the world and something of a death wish. Minimal self-preservation.

He repeated it like a mantra as the days went on, muttered out loud in his rare times wholly alone. Few and far between these days what with the way Jaskier had weaseled his way into his life.

“I don’t do hitchhikers,” he mumbled to his rig on his morning check, walking around the trailer and back to the front. He lay a hand on the grill, imagined the big, brick-red behemoth as some sentient thing frowning down at him in judgment, and he sighed. “I don’t _do_ hitchhikers. I don’t do hitchhikers. I don’t.”

* * *

Geralt drove in two month stretches on the road, a week of home time in between, though home time didn’t always mean going home. The trucking company had terminals all through the country, and he’d pull into the closest one, park the rig, and go on a week long bender in one shit motel or another.

Sometimes make a vacation of it and go see the sights. Lean out over an overlook somewhere peering at a vast stretch of American wilderness. Visit a casino. Watch a rodeo event. Go stand quietly at a war memorial, see if any of the little names were someone he knew once.

He’d drive all through the warmer months, spring to fall, but when the snow started falling up north, he’d go back to run snowplows through the winter. The trucking company owned a large fleet out of the Bangor terminal and, at least a few months out of the year, that got him closer to Yen, closer to Ciri.

His life had gone on like that for over two decades now, starting right after he got back stateside from two years driving supply trucks through the jungle in Vietnam. There was a comforting rhythm to it, a cadence. Long months on the road, winters up north, spring thaw sending him out across the country again, on and on.

That year, his latest separation from Yen still fresh and final, Geralt didn’t know what he’d do come winter.

But for the time being, it was spring, and he still had Jaskier in the truck with him against his better judgment.

It was same old, same old on the road. Pickups. Deliveries. Days driving on through forested hills or muddy farmland. Nights spent at truck stops, stopped in parking lots, or just pulled over to the shoulder. It was the same old headaches navigating routes and grumbling at the dispatcher and dealing with ornery receiving folks bitching about arrival times no matter if he got there early or late or right on schedule.

Same old headaches and one brand new headache who was busy loudly composing an exuberant ballad about life on the road, soundly refusing any attempts to drop him off somewhere.

“Jaskier,” said Geralt after about an hour of listening to his passenger run through different iterations of the same verse more times than was tolerable. “Don’t you ever shut the fuck up?”

“No,” said Jaskier sunnily. “Do you think _outlaw_ or _cowboy_ sounds better, hmm, Geralt?”

“Neither,” he grunted.

“Metal horse? Steel horse?” He pressed his pen to his lips and hummed. “I don’t know, is the metaphor obvious enough? You’re not being very helpful, Geralt.”

“Good.”

“Come on now, we’ll never write another chart topper with that attitude.”

“Since when is it ‘we’.”

“Since you became my vision, my muse, my font of inspiration on this long and winding highway called life, Geralt,” said Jaskier, voice rising breathy and melodramatic. “It’s practically poetry. The songs write themselves.”

“Then what do you need my help for,” Geralt grunted, and Jaskier mumbled about ungrateful, sour bastards and kept on composing.

At the next stop for a quick meal and hot coffee, Geralt didn’t realize until they were already back on the road that he’d forgotten once again to ask Jaskier if he wanted to get a move on already and part ways, find some other trucker to irritate half to death.

In late May somewhere near Lake Michigan when he was coming up on a week of home time, Jaskier asked, “wonder if the water’s warm enough to swim yet?”

And Geralt didn’t say anything, just parked his rig in the terminal near Gary and drove off the lot in a company sedan with a crushed velvet interior, Jaskier sprawled in the mauve passenger seat. If the motel room he rented happened to be a few blocks from the beach, then that was just a happy accident.

* * *

Thing is, Jaskier didn’t do impulsive, solo jaunts across the country.

Certainly not flat broke with nothing but his guitar, a small duffel, and the clothes on his back. Not hiking out along the gritty shoulder of the road and sleeping on any warm, dry surface he could find.

Jaunts across the country, yes, and sometimes impulsive ones, but never fully alone as he was now. Always a gaggle of bandmates or old friends or assorted groupies to bolster him along. Which was always how he preferred it, surrounded by a vapid rabble of raised voices and ridiculous ideas, people to write songs for and fuck and create art with and love freely, loosely, fleetingly.

Until suddenly, he didn’t prefer it, and the shows weren’t even that great and the crowds were lackluster and his bandmates irritating more than inspiring and it all started to feel futile, like a huge, stinking waste spent pissing his life away in close quarters with people he didn’t much care for, singing songs that didn’t really resonate, just shouting stupid, hollow nothings into the void of a world that would forget him in a blink.

The tour ended in a vicious spat at their motel of the night, Jaskier’s voice climbing to pitches he hardly ever even reached in song, inventing new curses along the way, and then he figured fuck it, who cares. The band fractured just like that with a final, shouted word, and Jaskier thought _I’ll go on without them. See the fucking world._

So he’d never done an impulsive, solo jaunt across the country, but he was on one now. He’d decided, ultimately, that he’d prefer not to do one again.

But admitting that out loud would mean that his one bandmate was _right_ when he called him a posh fucking nothing of a loser who’d never make it on his own without riding on the backs of people more talented than him, without the crutch of his wealthy folks up in Pacific Heights to fall back on.

So, hiking along the road until the raw skin of his ankles felt like it might slough right off was fine actually. Suffering was just raw material not yet distilled into art.

And if the last guy who picked him up, a balding dude in a big grey van whose breath reeked, was a little handsy, well that was just life on the road. He got a few free meals out of it and a place to sleep for the night and the carpet on the hard floor in the back of the van where he curled up with his duffel as a pillow wasn’t _that_ scratchy and probably only mildly infested with lice.

And if he hadn’t showered in a week and there was a crook in his neck something awful, then that just lent soul to his crooning as he busked on some curb or another, an artful crack in his dry voice.

Mostly, people were kind and generous and sympathetic and helpful, except, that is, for the people who weren’t.

The trucker who nudged him awake one rainy afternoon and pressed a coffee into his hands seemed like one of the good ones.

Or at least Jaskier hoped so, because he was that rugged kind of handsome that made his insides feel like they’d flipped around. Jaskier always loved like that, hard and immediate, circumstances and gender and good sense be damned. Still fuzzy with sleep as he climbed up into the cab of the guy’s semi, Jaskier thought _I am going to follow this man anywhere, everywhere, always_.

So, clarification, Jaskier didn’t do impulsive jaunts across the country, but he did do impulsive. The whole sum of his character and life so far could be encompassed by brash and potentially irrational decisions made simply for the romance and panache of it all.

So, though he’d never dropped everything to fling himself about the country in endless and reckless devotion to a man he met yesterday, well, it was only a matter of time.

The rig was brick-red, narrow-nosed, and older than most on the road, the dark brown faux leather of the seats in the cabin starting to crack around the edges and the ivory paint wearing off the slim, metal wheel. The boxy windshield looking over the nose of the truck was dusted with grime, the dimpled seams of the brown padding along the walls and ceiling looked like they might give way at any moment, and the floor of the cabin was more mud than steel.

The trucker surveyed the flat face of the dash with a practiced nonchalance, a mess of round gauges with flickering needles, slender rocker switches, and worn knobs. The gearshift rocked quick and easy in a calloused grip, his other arm swinging wide over the arc of the wheel. He looked maybe fifty, grey hair pulled back at the base of his neck, wearing a threadbare denim work shirt tucked into blue jeans, a copper belt buckle detailed with the head of a sharp-fanged wolf, and a bent-browed baseball cap. Rucked up sleeves offered a tantalizing glimpse of taut forearms, and even perpetually hunched in the driver’s seat, he cut an imposing figure that drew Jaskier’s gaze and held it.

But oh, it was tragic. The drama of it all nearly split his chest right open, because the man wore a sterling band on his ring finger, visible where his hand curled around the wheel as he drove.

And pinned to the wall on the driver’s side were two pictures of different women. One was big-haired and smiling coy on some beach vacation somewhere, leaning on the boardwalk to look over her bare shoulders, all frizzy curls and lean figure in high-waisted jeans. The other picture was of a blonde girl with her hair in slim braids and owlish, round glasses perched on her freckled nose, laughing, standing up on the fender of the big, red truck.

A wife and a girlfriend, he thought and would have asked which was which straight off, flippant and forthcoming as he tended to be, but the maudlin drama of it all made him hold his tongue.

Oh, how terrible it was to love a married man who would never love him back. How aching, how very heart-clenching and melancholic and miserable.

* * *

Jaskier knew he loved Geralt (breathlessly, enthusiastically, ardently) within the first hour on the road.

Geralt knew he loved Jaskier after about two months of tolerating his company. He fell in love in fits and starts like someone in a restless sleep, blinking in disoriented glimpses, rising up out of a dream that never quite solidified, and then waking all at once in a blaze of morning light.

It was on a barren stretch of flat Midwestern highway that he looked over at the man slumped in the passenger seat, face smoothed out as he dozed, and realized the sight had somehow grown familiar, a comfortable presence beside him. And his eyelashes sure were long and dark and pretty, and the silence of the highway felt suddenly strange without his warm voice to fill it with chatter, and Geralt thought _oh. oh fuck._ Turned his eyes back on the road.

* * *

An incomplete list of impulsive things Jaskier did throughout his life, up to and including said jaunt across the country:

1\. Dropped out of UC Berkeley's music program after three semesters, confident that he could learn more out there in the world than in some stuffy classroom (he was probably right). He’d only enrolled to dodge the draft, and then the lottery skipped him every time anyway. Ended up breaking his poor posh mother’s heart and infuriating his well to do father but everyone knew suffering artists thrived on the sting of familial rejection.

2\. Lived in a VW bus touring up through Washington with a couple of folks who ended up fucking around more than they played. Camped out in the forest most nights to stir up a bonfire, all raw fingers on guitar strings and howling at the moon and sex with anyone who’d have him, waking dew-covered and sour-mouthed, curled up against tree roots and naked skin.

3\. Got three-way hitched to two flower child, buxom girls at some music festival drenched in rain, the tent sagging and fogged with hookah smoke, the world almost iridescent while his buddy held their hands, cross-legged on the floor, and said _until death do you part for better or for worse amen amen_ and the girls kissed and then kissed him and the ribbon tying their three hands together fell away. Jaskier was pretty sure that wasn’t legally or spiritually binding, but only pretty sure.

4\. Missed Woodstock in ‘69 for some piddling event out in Tucson, the blistering summer heat of the desert drawing him less than the sweet, blonde thing that he’d followed there. Ended up plucking cactus spines out of his bare ass after an argument with his muse, his starshine, the light of his meager life ended in a naked tumble down some loose scree into a ditch full of thorns. All while his buddies were up making history in some soggy, New York field. Never heard the end of that one.

5\. Didn’t stick long in one place or with one group of friends, not even in ‘74 when as the frontrunner of a little nothing band based in Portland, he sang something twangy and upbeat that stuck on the charts a few weeks, brushing just shy of the top spot. That whole summer there were folks singing his song wherever he went, a high that bolstered him up above the clouds, but even when he was in the midst of rowdy bars howling along to his voice on the radio, no one quite recognized him, no one knew his name, and so in short order, he left Portland behind.

6\. Moved up to Seattle and into an artist’s collective, playing shows with different people at different bars every night, keeping to the crowds that skirted the edge of acceptable society. Ended up falling head over heels for a red-headed drag queen who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Saying in her mellow, rich voice, dark skin limned with glitter like fish scales, _now honey, go on home now. Quit your slobberin’ over me. Go on and get._ Spent two months crooning at her anyway until she finally fucked him against the dumpster in a stinking alley behind the gay bar, her red wig gone askew, sequin silver dress rucked up past her muscled thighs as she thrust, eight inch heels and all.

7\. Saw Geralt one morning the first month in, the windows in the cab all fogged up and the both of them just waking, Geralt with his head still pillowed in the crook of his arm in the bunk, Jaskier snugged back in the seat at the perfect angle to look, and told him “God, you are so beautiful, anyone ever tell you? God.”

8\. Told him in Denver five years on, a perfect red sunrise splitting over the mountains through the window of his hospital room, his voice a shallow rasp, “I think I’m going to love you for all time, darling. To the end of the world.”

* * *

“Got to make a call,” said Geralt every Friday as he eased the truck along one exit ramp or another, parked her somewhere secure for the night and trekked toward the nearest payphone.

“Hey there,” Yen would say over the line, and he could imagine her sitting in her kitchen, cord curled around her arm, glass of booze leaving a ring of condensation on the tile countertop.

“Hey Yen,” he’d say and then tell her where he was, what the weather was like, how the traffic had been. He asked, “how’s Ciri?” and Yen told him, said maybe she’d be home next weekend when he called and they could talk awhile if Ciri wanted.

“I picked up a hitchhiker,” he said.

“Oh? How’d that go?”

“Still with me. He’s some free spirit musician kid. Down on his luck.”

“And you’re tolerating him?”

“Not really,” he said. “I’ll probably drop him off at the next exit. Annoying bastard. Won’t stop singing.”

Except the next Friday, he hadn’t shaken him yet.

“You gone soft in your old age, Geralt?” Yen asked.

“You’re older than me, Yen.”

“But not soft!”

“Yeah, hard as a fuckin’ glacier.”

Some other Friday, later than usual, he said, “he’s writing a song about me.” Yen full on cackled, well into the peach brandy by this time of night.

“Oh man, he’s got a big ole schoolboy crush on you, huh?”

“No,” said Geralt, then paused a moment to consider it. “Yes.”

Jaskier was not subtle in his interest, all blatant flirtation and barely-concealed romantic confessions, usually in the form of song.

“Is he pretty?” Yen slurred, and Geralt shifted on his feet, glancing about the empty corner of the mall where the phones were tucked. There were no secrets between them, so Yen knew about his fleeting interest in men and didn’t see the big deal. She’d dallied in a similar way back in college and still carried an old flame for her best friend, Triss, that would have taken only a word from the other to re-ignite.

It still felt like a thing one didn’t just say out loud in the open in the middle of the day, regardless of no one being around to hear.

Geralt swallowed, pressed the phone up close to his chin and leaned forward into the partition of the phone booth, like if he hid his face he couldn’t be overheard, it wasn’t real. His stomach lurched, heart taking up a staccato beat in his chest.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “He’s real pretty.”

Yen didn’t tease. She just said _well don’t let me keep you from him_.

Geralt didn’t know whether she meant on the phone or something else, something about their failed marriage, about the finality of this last separation.

“He’s so young,” said Geralt. “No way. He looks barely older than Ciri.”

“He’s an adult. You won’t break him. Don’t be so serious, Geralt,” she said, just drunk enough that she didn’t hide the tenderness in her voice. “I don’t want you to be lonely out there. I don’t want you to be alone.”

He sank the phone into its cradle, went on back to the truck where Jaskier was waiting for him.

* * *

June found them in northern Pennsylvania, the weather still unseasonably cool up through the ambling mountains, steam coming off the rig in the mornings like coiled smoke.

They stopped somewhere near Erie for the night, parked up in an empty lot up a low-rise from a cluster of fast food places. He and Jaskier walked down the hill together in the cooling dusk, good to feel the stretch of their thighs and calves after a long day of driving. Their arms swung close enough to brush sometimes, and they made easy chatter back and forth.

Geralt didn’t remember what he said, some joke about craving a coke and a burger and a hooker or two after that drive.

“How would your wife feel about that?” Jaskier teased, and they’d never talked about her, not really, or at least Geralt had never clarified what she was to him now. He hardly knew what she was to him.

“Ex-wife,” said Geralt.

“Oh?” Jaskier said, and Geralt knew he was looking at the old ring he took to spinning on his knuckle, a nervous habit. “Recently?”

“Divorced ten years ago,” he said. “It was amiable.”

And split up half a dozen times since then, but he knew better than to try to explain all that. He and Yen didn’t make sense, contradicted one another at every turn, but the ring was a promise same as the phone calls. Didn’t matter that the promise had shifted over the years. Something lasting bound them all the same.

“Then who’s that other girl? In the pictures in your cab? Girlfriend? Second ex-wife I don’t know about?” Jaskier was saying. They crossed the parking lot of the burger place at an easy stroll, a flickering streetlight leeching yellow color into Jaskier’s shaggy hair.

“My daughter,” said Geralt. “Ciri. She’s around your age. Just about to start school up north. Studying law.”

Jaskier stopped on the sidewalk and turned to look at him, brows drawn together, mouth half-parted.

“Geralt,” he said. “I’m fucking thirty-seven.”

Geralt stopped too, and they looked at each other all deer in the headlights stunned.

“You’re not married,” said Jaskier.

“You’re not too young for me,” said Geralt.

And the two of them bubbled up with incredulous laughter, couldn’t quite stop all through dinner. Jaskier kept stealing his fries no matter how often he was swatted away, and Geralt kept _smiling_ of all things, his cheeks gone stiff with it by the time they tossed their garbage and left the place behind.

They went back up the hill at the same easy pace, fully dark now, boots scuffing through the gravel along the shoulder of the road, and they swung up into the cab of the truck, hinges of the doors squealing. They brushed their teeth out on the fenders and spit into the dark, stole out to piss one last time before bed, twisted the dial on the alarm for the morning, and when Geralt crawled onto the sleeper bunk, he curled back to look at Jaskier sitting straight-backed in the passenger seat and held open his arms.

Jaskier hitched himself up and folded into them with hardly a pause for breath.

* * *

Years on in the still hush of the midnight cab, eyes prickling with sleep, Geralt found some small comfort in imagining that there was some other universe where the story went on and on, he and Jaskier on the road together.

When Geralt retired a decade or so down the line, it would be to a cabin out on Big Sur, orange rocks tumbled into sea foam on the crux of the coast. The slithering roll of the road through the hills going on until it came to a nut-brown house with a latticed breezeway grown up with jasmine and a sliding glass door from their open living room to a wrap-around deck that looked out over the choppy surf.

Spilled with red geraniums in the summer, Jaskier sunning out there naked, all freckled and growing a paunch, soft at the edges, crow’s feet and laugh lines wrinkling his smile. Geralt coming up from the air-conditioned garage with a cold beer and bending to kiss the line of his back, sun-heated skin on chilled lips.

And Yennefer visiting sometimes and Ciri with her new wife and the baby, and all of them sitting drinking wine while the stars pricked out over the ocean, one wish at a time.

And the two of them would talk, often, about the old brick-red Peterbilt and the miles and miles of road, and oh, how fond the words sounded in his head. When Jaskier smiled that crooked, old grin and said, “I would have driven on with you forever, love. How in love we were and hardly said it enough. How good it was to be with you on that road through it all.”

They would go on to bed. The soft yield of their bodies given over to time, their creaking, old joints, Jaskier’s voice faded scratchy and hushed even as he sang some sweet lullaby into Geralt’s hair.

It didn’t happen like that, but it was a nice and bittersweet thing to think about, a tender ache that settled up under his ribs while the wheels hummed along the miles.

* * *

The first kiss burnt like a brand in the close dark of the sleeper.

There was no room to be anything but right on top of one another, the long line of their bodies pressed snug, their kissing urgent and eager.

Geralt had never kissed a man, rarely so much as hugged one. The fumbling mutual masturbation with fellows during the war had been nothing like this, none of the desperate ache to be closer still, to somehow try to convey the huge and slippery and terrible feeling that unfurled in his chest with simply mouth and hands and body heat.

He fumbled Jaskier’s belt open, needing to feel skin, needing to feel him, and smoothed along the slick small of his back to shove his jeans down past his hips, to grasp at his bare ass.

Jaskier shivered at that and tried to pull free of the kiss, their noses bumping together.

“Wait, we need-- wait, Geralt,” gasped Jaskier, pushing against Geralt’s pawing hands, struggling to break from the surge of their kissing to speak against his parted lips. “Protection?”

“I’m clean,” grunted Geralt. He needed to be even closer, needed to taste him, and he never messed about in the truck, didn’t keep condoms around, hadn’t had any need to.

“I’m-- Geralt, I’m not,” said Jaskier. “I’m--”

Geralt’s big hands stilled on Jaskier’s waist.

“What?”

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” Jaskier breathed. He made to squirm away, but Geralt’s grip tightened, their ragged breath mingling, too dark to see the other man’s face. “I should have said something, but I didn’t think--”

“You’re…”

“Positive,” said Jaskier. His voice, hovering just above a whisper, still seemed too loud in the enclosed space. “Found out this winter. No symptoms or anything yet.”

“Jaskier,” said Geralt softly. He curled his fingers down around the thin jut of the other man’s hip bone. Could feel a pulse there against the calloused pad of his thumb. Wished he could see his face. Wished he could go back an hour to the sight of his hair brushed ochre by a streetlight, not looking even a little bit like a thing that was dying. He’d thought then, _god, I want to kiss him so badly._

He still did.

“I’m sorry,” Jaskier said again, voice cracked and weird. His head met the back of the passenger seat with a soft thump as he tried to put distance between them. “Should have told you. I’m sorry.”

Geralt pressed forward to kiss him again, off-center, tipped to the side of his mouth and found the flushed skin of Jaskier’s cheeks wet with tears. Couldn’t keep the shake out of the rough hand that rose to smear them away.

“Can’t afford the meds,” he said, small and tight.

“God, Jaskier,” said Geralt, and he didn’t really know what else could be said. Not too good with words and maybe nothing could sum up the wild, frantic, wounded thing that beat in his chest. So he let it settle around them in the dark of the bunk, so he kissed the other man deep and slow. On the lips and along the wet drag of his tears, on the cusp of his head when Jaskier curled shivering in his arms.

Next stop off at a filling station, he bought condoms. Made sure Jaskier was looking while he tucked the box between the seats nestled up against Jaskier’s guitar case. No words spoken. The action loud and deliberate as a promise.

* * *

Thing is, Jaskier didn’t do casual sex.

Sure, he had sex liberally and passionately and often, but he loved every single partner with a deeply-felt ardour. Nothing casual or simple about any of the tumbles he engaged in, even at their most brief and temporary. Some carried more weight, while others flickered out after a moment, but it was never just a quick lay.

He was fifteen his first time, sequestered in the backseat of his best friend’s car with a senior whose blonde hair curled in waves down to the small of her back. He loved her, raw and visceral, like his heart might explode behind his ribcage. When she graduated and ran off to marry some movie producer in LA, he split his fingers raw composing songs for her she’d never listen to.

It went on like that through his years of prep school and then his few semesters at Berkeley and then his years travelling. Falling dreadfully and hopelessly in love with everyone he touched, sometimes to disastrous consequence.

Mainly to himself.

He didn’t know which time it was, which partner it had been. He wasn’t always safe or smart or patient, and he was hardly ever careful.

But it felt like the whole world had been that way when the sexual revolution was in full swing and he was in his twenties and he had a different partner or group of partners every week. He fell into bed with women and men and people that toed strange lines in between. He was attentive and generous and never left a partner wanting, and he loved them all fervently and decadently.

He didn’t know which tender, amorous affair had been the one to kill him, and he didn’t care. He knew he loved them and would do it again, would forgive them, wished them well wherever they were in the world.

He didn’t do casual sex, he told the young doctor with a wink when asked, and the man seemed unamused, asked if he’d been tested for sexually transmitted diseases recently. He’d swung by the clinic with a scratchy throat, not willing to risk the health of his singing voice so close to their tour, and his band’s management was paying for it anyway, so why not?

“Give me the full workup, doc,” Jaskier had drawled, leaning back on the table and giving the doctor a look that seemed to fluster him, and as the nurse drew a vial of blood from the crook of his elbow, he was thinking maybe when he swung by next week to pick up his test results, he’d push his luck and ask the young doctor out for a good time, coffee at the least.

Instead, the next time he saw the young doctor, he leaned to clasp Jaskier’s shoulder, eyes gentle, face a sympathetic mask, and told Jaskier what the last few years of his life would be like.

He didn’t do casual sex, and in the past few months, he hadn’t had any sex at all. Not through the time his band stuck together on tour, not in his miserable week spent hitchhiking, and with Geralt-- well, Geralt was unattainable.

Not just a married man (he’d had married men before), but a man that could hardly stand him and was straight as an arrow, a man he felt confident could never want him. Especially if he knew.

Until he did. Until he knew. Until he wanted Jaskier anyway.

* * *

Thing is, Geralt didn’t do casual sex.

Well, if you didn’t count hookers, but that was professional sex more than casual. And there wasn’t really a time or a place for much else on the road. It was all too much effort and risk for not much more reward than he could get by his own hand.

In their early years, Yen had always asked, suspicious and accusing. Geralt never asked in return. He knew there were times she was unfaithful, so he didn’t ask. The accusations stopped after the first decade, changed to _I worry about you, Geralt. I worry you’ll be fixated on me forever and never let anyone else in. I don’t want you to be alone._ He didn’t know which was worse.

Geralt didn’t do casual sex, because sex without intimacy was the same as masturbation and intimacy without vulnerability was meaningless and vulnerability required a promise of _I will keep these secret parts of you safe._ He didn’t break oaths like that, couldn’t break them. Unlike his father, he wasn’t the kind of guy who could just walk away.

The motel where Geralt stopped for the night sat on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, tucked into a hill just off the exit. The truck idled longer than necessary in the parking lot, his hands twisting on the wheel. He didn’t quite know how to ask. He didn’t know how to say to Jaskier _this isn’t casual this isn’t temporary this is me swearing an oath._

A hand reached to join his on the wheel, long fingers brushing his knuckles, touching the ridge of Yen’s sterling silver wedding band. Geralt looked at Jaskier beside him in the darkened cab, and he was smiling, lopsided and affectionate, a look that sunk something low in Geralt’s stomach. Jaskier reached down between the seats, lifted up the little box of condoms. He took one of Geralt’s hands from the wheel, kissed the rough flesh of his upturned palm.

Geralt didn’t have to ask, and he didn’t have to say anything.

Jaskier understood.

Together, they walked across the parking lot, shoulders bumping. Bought a room for the night from a bored-looking attendant. Geralt’s eyes followed Jaskier’s every small movement. The key swinging around his finger, the twist of his hand as he pressed it into the lock, the line of his throat as he tipped his head back to laugh when the door swung to reveal the little room had only one bed.

“Were we really that obvious?” Jaskier was saying as Geralt shut the door behind them. He didn’t want to think about how he must have looked from an outside perspective, the way he’d looked at Jaskier, how he was still looking.

“Probably,” he said, voice hardly his own, choked low and gravelly with desire.

Jaskier heard it, turned to him. Saw whatever intense and embarrassing way Geralt was looking at him. It must have been just as bad as Geralt thought, because he swallowed hard, Adam’s apple dipping in his throat, and reached out a hand to skirt the line of Geralt’s jaw.

“Darling,” he said, his face washed pale in the light filtering from the parking lot through the thin curtains. His thumb caught on Geralt’s bottom lip, held there. “Come to bed.”

Years on, of all their nights and days and moments together, Geralt took the most scrupulous care in calling up each detail of that night. Frame by frame, he held each moment in his memory, preserved with every breath and gesture and touch kept fastidiously intact. No miniscule fragment lost in the retelling. Nothing faded or chipped loose or gathering dust.

They kissed in a long, continuous swell of contact that hardly broke through the night, breathing against each other’s lips, reluctant to part even to draw air. Jaskier pulled them backwards to the bed, and Geralt fell to bracket him with his arms. It became an effort to separate long enough to tug their shirts over their heads and shuck off their boots, wriggle free of their jeans, but at last, they found themselves bare chest to bare chest.

An odd thing, to feel against him the way that Jaskier was angled and rigid and lean, a touch of softness in his belly and chest but none of the give that women had. A down of hair covered him from navel to breast, and though rod-thin and lanky, there was a strength to him, a wiry tension to his slender arms and shoulders, a firm grip to his thighs. Geralt discovered this with touch more than sight, his clumsy hands as unwilling to draw away from Jaskier’s body as he was to still their kissing.

“Geralt,” Jaskier choked, pulling back, sweat-damp foreheads pressed together. “ _Geralt, are you sure?_ ” The tremble of his small voice ached in Geralt’s chest, but he didn’t say _of course, God, of course I’m sure_ , just moved to taste him again, reached for the box of condoms, the bottle of dollar store lube that had fallen to the bed.

Details pressed into Geralt’s memory like flowers into wax paper: the dark smear of Jaskier’s eyelashes, the freckles darkening his shoulders, the pink flush across his chest as he drew trembling breaths, the red gasp of his mouth as Geralt pressed between his spread thighs, the flex of the tendons at the back of his knees as Geralt curled his hands around his legs and lifted, the twitch of his erection against the soft swell of his belly, the thready tenor of a held note as their body’s fit together, the snap of Geralt’s hips that inspired a lowered groan.

Even in the moment, every touch was an act of memorization, cataloguing the shifts and sounds and tremors. Called into memory even as it unfolded before him.

It didn’t go on and on all night. Ended with a sharp exhale through his nose as Geralt slowed the roll of his thrusts to a stutter, a stilted hum as Jaskier spilled into the curl of his own hand.

“Fuck,” Jaskier breathed into the crook of his neck.

Across the years, Geralt could close his eyes and feel the ghost of it against his skin.

* * *

The rest of the season sprawled out into a blur of diner food and highway markers and road signs and diesel exhaust, same as it had been. Jaskier occupied the long hours cooped up in the cab with song or with irritating road trip games, some of his own invention.

“Would you stop fucking pointing out every goddamn cow you see?” Geralt grunted after the tenth time that hour that Jaskier cooed _oooh, cows_.

“I spy with my little eye someone who is a real dickhead,” said Jaskier with arms crossed.

While the days stretched on like that, the nights took on a different rhythm. In the cramped sleeper bunk or truck stop motel rooms, they drew close and closer still. Sometimes slow and careful like the first time, other times rough, frenzied, Geralt’s teeth along the line of Jaskier’s shoulder, Jaskier’s hands fisted in his hair.

They tipped headlong into summer, driving the whole way down the east coast and then north again, zig-zagging here and there. In July somewhere north of Richmond, Virginia with Geralt’s next week of home time coming up, Jaskier requested a genuine beach vacation.

“Last one didn’t count,” he said.

The both of them bought swim trunks and beach towels and a flimsy umbrella at a kitschy tourist shop on the edge of the boardwalk and spent a hell of a time navigating the crowded beach until Jaskier found the perfect spot to lay out and tan. He freckled and burned instead while Geralt parked himself steadfastly under the scant shade of the umbrella and refused to come out except when begged to _please, please, go buy me a snack or something, I’m famished I’m dying_.

When Geralt finally managed to trek back to their spot with a mustard-smeared hot dog in each hand, he found Jaskier dead asleep on his belly, the slim line of his back already going pink from the sun, his mouth open and drooling against the peach-colored towel.

He looked more boyish than usual in sleep, but in the bright light, Geralt saw more clearly the little tells that revealed his deceiving age. A slight wrinkle of crow’s feet, a dusting of sparse grey in his chestnut hair.

Mustard running down his wrist, Geralt thought _but he’ll never get old_ , and he folded himself down beside Jaskier, scuffing sand onto the towel as he did so, his shadow falling across the man’s body. Jaskier grumbled awake to protest the blocking of the sun. Distinctly aware of the bustling noise of the beach around him, Geralt did not bend to kiss him, just offered out one of the dripping hot dogs and Jaskier groaned with thanks and took it from him, and later that night in their motel room, he did kiss him, wind-chapped lips and all.

In September after not quite two months on the road again, somewhere near Delaware this time, Jaskier asked, “where to, Geralt?”

And they headed to the coast.

* * *

"Got hitched in Vegas,” said Geralt one evening, the cheap beer loosening his tongue.

“No shit,” said Jaskier.

It was October, and they were put up in a motel for a few days while the rig suffered some impromptu maintenance and had taken advantage of the unexpected time off with the purchase of a whole case of beer from the distributor next door. They’d been given a room with two twin beds but first thing they did upon entering their drab lodgings was to bodily shove them together. Nevermind that Geralt would likely end up with his shoulder swallowed between the mattresses during the night.

Jaskier sprawled on top of the still-made bed, strumming the odd note on his guitar while Geralt leaned back against the headboard, peeling the label off his bottle. Both were past tipsy into a comfortable, blurred buzz.

“Chapel off a strip mall,” Geralt said, remembering the cracked lot half-sunk into the scrubby desert, liquid heat slipping in waves over the horizon, and Yennefer’s coy grin as she tugged at his hand.

“Oof,” Jaskier said. “How romantic.”

“Well, as you can guess, didn’t last long.”

“Eh, I can hardly judge. Comparatively eons by my standards.”

“We were high school sweethearts,” Geralt said, not sure what prompted him to keep talking. He wasn’t that drunk. He peered down the long neck of his bottle and felt Jaskier watching him. “Came home from overseas and went right out on the road. She dropped out of college to come along.”

They weren’t six months on the road before they were newlyweds stepping out of the chapel into the dry strip mall parking lot, their fingers entangled, their joy rippling out like the heat on the desert air. Wasn’t six months after that that she left him and went home. A few months along with Ciri, she said on the phone _you’re just going to keep driving and driving your whole goddamn life and never get anywhere at all._

“You still love her?” Jaskier asked. Flat on his back, he fingered a few chords on his guitar, gaze shifted somewhere on the cobwebs dusting the corners.

“She’s family,” said Geralt, which wasn’t an answer, but it was the truth.

“That’s good,” said Jaskier, and he sounded strange and stuffy, maybe from the beer. He smiled at the ceiling, let his hand slip down the neck of the instrument, a ring sliding on the strings with a jarring squeak. “She’ll be there for you, then. When I’m gone.”

Geralt felt suddenly sober.

Sometime after, he called Yen, listened to her tell him about Ciri’s first semester at school going well, about the girl she had befriended in the dorms, about her suspicion that she and Ciri were more than friends, how she hadn’t said so but oh, the way she talked about that girl and she was busy with midterms but she’d be home for fall break soon and Geralt could talk with her then maybe and--

“Yen,” said Geralt. “Jaskier’s sick.”

“Like… the flu?” Yen asked.

He could imagine her in the kitchen of the little house in Maine, phone tucked under her chin and cord stretching so she could do dishes while she spoke to him. Water running over her hands, and evening light coming in through the tendrils of the spider plant above the kitchen sink. Her little, purple tea towels. The ivory ceramic plates edged with raised grape vines. The details of Yennefer’s home called to mind as intimately as he knew that it wasn’t _his_ home. Not anymore or never had been.

“No, he’s-- He’s got HIV,” Geralt said.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, hun.”

“Don’t know what to do, Yen.”

There was the soft clink of the plate she had been drying set down on the counter. A gentle thud and he could see her turned away from the sink, resting back against the cabinets, both hands cupping the phone to her ear. He knew the way she looked when she was processing bad news, her eyes closed, her lips pulled thin.

“Do you love him?” she asked.

“He’s--” The air in the truck stop phonebooth had grown stuffy and too-warm, and he struggled to draw breath. He didn’t know how to put any of it into words, the things he felt for Jaskier. He didn’t know how to say _it scares the goddamn shit out of me_ , but Yen heard it anyway.

“Please be safe,” she said.

“We’re being safe.”

“No, not that,” said Yen, tinny voice crackling over the line. “I mean… I don’t want you to get hurt, Geralt. I know how you are.”

“I’m being safe,” he said. It was a lie.

“He’s going to die. He’s dying, Geralt, and I know how you are,” she said. “You’re going to stick by his side to the bitter end, and it’s going to kill you too.”

“You think I should--” He couldn’t say it. _You think I should leave him._

“I can’t tell you what to do,” Yen said. “I know I can’t and I never could, but please just be careful, Geralt.”

It was too late for careful, but he didn’t tell her that.

* * *

“Take me with you up north this winter,” Jaskier crooned one morning with frost bloomed across the windshield while they curled close in the bunk, the thin blankets hardly keeping out the autumn chill. “We’ll rent a cabin with a little woodstove somewhere, and I’ll keep the fire going until you’re all done with your shift. Then we’ll go on to bed, and I’ll warm you up, wouldn’t that be nice, darling?”

And it would be nice, it was a nice daydream, and Geralt said so, pressing his lips against the round of Jaskier’s eyelids, the dip of his jaw.

But there was nice, and then, there was safe.

“I can’t take you,” he told Jaskier. “I can’t be dragging you up there.” _Can’t keep dragging this out._ He laid his head on the smaller man’s chest to avoid his eyes. Jaskier’s fingers pressed into his hair, and his bare chest lifted and fell beneath Geralt’s cheek.

“I understand,” he said, which was good, because then maybe at least one of them did. “In spring, if you… I’ll be around.”

Heading north through hills burnished with autumn color, he dropped Jaskier off at a friend’s place outside Boston, a slip of paper with a phone number pressed into Geralt’s hand. Geralt didn’t make any promises, no guarantees that Jaskier would even stick in one place through the winter, but it was something, the little scribbled number tucked into his wallet.

When the truck rumbled to a stop where Jaskier had asked to be let out, there was no parting embrace along with their goodbyes, just Jaskier’s blue eyes gone wet as he wished him well, jumped down from the fender, turned back to wave him off.

Geralt rocked the truck into gear, eyes set steadfastly ahead, and drove north.

* * *

In spring, the phone rang for a long beat of held breath, buzzing in the cradle pressed hard against his ear.

“Hullo?” answered Jaskier, voice muzzy with sleep.

“Jaskier,” said Geralt.

And drove to pick him up again.

* * *

Along they went on the road, through the muddied thaw of spring into the dusty haze of summer into the cool bluster of autumn. Instead of heading up north as the snow began to fall, Geralt drove on through the salt crust of the roads, their breath pluming white in the chilled cab.

On the cusp of the holidays, he realized he’d never asked if Jaskier had family, if he had any plans to head home. He let out a great bark of laughter when Geralt brought it up.

“Oh, I’ve got some,” he said. “Though I’m sure they’d like to forget it. My folks were very clear on my conditions for being accepted back into the fold. Namely to quit being a queer sack of shit and a disgrace to the family name. Which, as you are very aware, has not yet happened.”

“Well, I have family,” said Geralt. “I mean. If you wanted to, you could… you know...” He made a sweeping gesture that was somehow meant to sum up the mortifying concept of introducing his male partner and traveling companion to his ex-wife and young daughter.

“You going to bring me home to the missus, darling?” Jaskier drawled, and Geralt’s cheeks heated.

The turn of the solstice found them chugging north to park in the Bangor terminal, where Yen met them in the lot. She leaned against the door of her red Firebird, fur coat and dark curls ruffling in the wind.

“Hi, Jaskier,” she said and scoffed at his sheepish wilting at Geralt’s side and dragged him in for a hug. Pulled back at arm’s length to regard him, said _you’re right, Geralt, he is very pretty_ just so Geralt would fluster and Jaskier would squirm. Then, she drove them, the engine of the Firebird roaring along winding roads, to her little house in the middle of nowhere.

The porch door slammed as Ciri rushed out to meet them, her loose, white-blonde hair blurring into the snow as Geralt swept her under his arm.

“You sang that one song,” said Ciri when Jaskier introduced himself, and she sang the chorus, her voice tuneless and carrying across the yard. Geralt had still never heard it. “I looked you up. You still play?”

Jaskier grinned, gestured to the guitar case slung across his back, and the rest of the holidays were spent as a series of rousing sing-a-longs huddled in Yen’s front room before the brick fireplace. The walls of the old house groaned in a swirling blizzard, but inside, the coals glowed in the fire as they drank too much mulled cider, feasted on too many sugar-dusted Christmas cookies.

Geralt didn’t expect Yen and Jaskier to get on as seamlessly as they did, though he found himself often perplexed by the cutting edge to their banter.

“No wonder Geralt thought you were so young,” Yennefer said, well into the peach brandy, leaning towards Jaskier over the arm of the sofa. “The 70s called, and they want their mullet back.” Jaskier narrowed his eyes, fingering the overgrown hair sweeping the length of his neck.

“Yeah, well, your hair gets any bigger, shit’s going to start orbiting around it,” he said, and Yen huffed, petting her artfully-styled frizzy curls.

One night, with the fire burned low and Jaskier and Yennefer curled dozing under blankets on the couch, their feet tucked together for warmth, Ciri came to sit cross-legged at his feet, leaning back against his legs. It still surprised Geralt every time he turned to look at her and saw a young woman.

“I met someone in school,” she said. “A girl.”

“Ok,” said Geralt, and his hand twitched, settled on the top of her head. Knew there was something he should say here and couldn’t begin to fumble for the words. She sat peering into the fire, and his hands ran through her hair in broad strokes, same as he had done when she was a little girl. “That’s ok.”

“You’re with Jaskier?” Ciri asked, and Geralt’s hands stilled. “ _With_ him, I mean,” she clarified.

“Yeah,” he said, though they’d never said as much out loud. “Yeah, I’m with him.”

Christmas dinner almost ended in Yen burning down her kitchen as Geralt rescued a thoroughly blackened roast from the oven, and New Years Eve culminated in all of them shit-faced out in the yard as a fresh, heavy snowfall muffled their midnight hollering and banging of pots and pans as the year turned.

At the end of the holiday, Yen’s Firebird tore across the snow-blanketed road to the terminal, and she and Ciri waved their goodbyes from the lot as they climbed back into the truck. Jaskier wore a new, neon-colored winter coat, a Christmas gift from Yennefer, and he looked so completely ridiculous perched in the worn leather seat of the cab that Geralt had to lean to kiss the silly grin off his face.

The years went on like that. Their little life on the road interrupted only by winters spent up north crashing at Yen’s place and by week-long stretches of home time where the pair of them sought out whatever lake or ocean or riverbank they could find and rested there a while.

It was nearly five years like that. The long miles and their snatches of borrowed family, the songs and the road and the coast.

* * *

“What’s with you and big bodies of water?” asked Geralt.

“It’s just romantic, isn’t it?” said Jaskier with the flash of a grin. “It’s a fantasy. It’s pure escapism.”

“Hmm.”

“It’s standing before something vast and endless and thinking how you don’t matter at all, not really. But it’s not depressing. At least, I don’t think so. It’s comforting,” he said. “You know, like all the old poets did. Stood before sublime nature and allowed it to dwarf them to tiny, mortal specks. I’m a piece of that. That’s the legacy I’m a part of.”

Geralt forgot, often, that Jaskier was well-educated, far more so than him at least. Not just some bumbling musician with perplexingly inconsistent stylistic choices but a poet and philosopher as well. Geralt didn’t know what the old poets had to say about any of it, but he knew in that moment what he wished he had the words to say to Jaskier.

“Let’s head to the coast. Get away for a while,” he breathed dreamily, and Geralt kissed him full on the mouth. Hoped that was enough to express at least some fragment of it all. “See how that sounds? It’s concentrated _romance_.”

Geralt didn’t think he quite understood until the next time he saw Jaskier stop before a great stretch of water and pause to look out, uncharacteristically still and quiet. He saw it then, how small the man looked on the cusp of the sea. How the rounding horizon eclipsed him, the powder blue of the sky and slate-grey of the ocean.

At certain times of day with the sun glinting off the water, Jaskier could shift and disappear into a gleam of refracted light as Geralt watched, returning in a blink as a silhouette limned in brilliance or not at all.

* * *

An incomplete list of moments from weeks spent on the coast:

1\. Lake Michigan. Mid-May but still too cold to go down to the beach and the second half of the week gone grey with storms. Wet rivulets down the windows of their motel room while Jaskier strummed his guitar and crooned, and Geralt didn’t mean to watch him so closely but found looking away to be harder said than done. The crackle of thunder breaking above them. The rippled black surface of the lake.

2\. Virginia Beach. Sweltering July heat on the boardwalk. The burn of the sand against bare legs soothed by the evening cool lap of the tide. Jaskier’s shoulders baked red by the first day, a constant flush across his cheeks. Out in the surf to his waist, the water swelling and receding along his still-pale stomach. Geralt daring in the dark beat between fireworks one night to press a public kiss to his sun-warmed neck.

3\. The Palisades. The New York skyline shimmering across the Hudson and sheer, tree-lined cliffs looming up behind them. Meager stretches of brown silt to wade along. A passing cargo ship sucking the water from the shore, pulling against their ankles. Autumn beginning to touch the browned edges of the leaves. Jaskier shrugging on one of Geralt’s flannels, the sleeves far too long for his arms so Geralt sighed and rolled them for him, his fingers skirting the thin bones of Jaskier’s wrists. The impulse to bend and taste the blue-veined pulse there. An impulse obeyed with a tender press of lips.

4\. Miami. The palms swaying along the wide streets, their hotel a peach and aquamarine highrise with a balcony that couldn’t quite glimpse the Atlantic Ocean. A street vendor offering Jaskier a whole coconut, chilled in ice, a colorful straw curling from the sliced top. The lapping ocean warm as a bath, swirling turquoise in the shallows along the white sand. A bottle of rum shared in their hotel room, drunk straight from the bottle and passed back and forth by the neck. The white curtains on the open door blowing out in the wind to slip against them while Jaskier gripped the railing of the balcony and Geralt fucked up into him, staccato thrusts of his hips, the city lights below, the stars trying to blink into the blue dusk overhead.

5\. San Francisco. Jaskier showing him all his old haunts and dives without showing him any of the ones that hurt. A fog holding close over the bay the whole week, so thick voices could be heard from boats on the water clear as if spoken beside them. The tide surging in a chilled rush against their legs as the empty beach, the low-slung clouds, the grey blur of sky and sand allowed them to sling arms about each other’s waists and hold on. Geralt bending to Jaskier’s ear, arms snug around his shoulders, to say _Real glad I’m here with you_ , knowing it would carry across the water.

6\. Susquehanna River, somewhere in nowhere, Pennsylvania. The wide, brown river running slow and shallow. Not Jaskier’s image of an ideal vacation, but the truck was in the shop and this was what he was getting. Passing a joint back and forth perched on a picnic bench at the campground they were staying, put up in a rented canvas tent. A floodplain field on the edge of dusk alive with the blink of fireflies, Jaskier letting them crawl on his hands and alight. Regretting their rutting embrace on the dark swathe of the flickering meadow only for the later swell of mosquito bites.

7\. Martha’s Vineyard. Both of them invited to stay at Yen’s parents’ place on the quiet side of the island. Meeting Yen and Ciri on the ferry dock, Geralt sweeping them both up in his arms, Yen pulling Jaskier into the embrace as well. Lobster bisque at some posh cafe in a white-washed town on the edge of the Atlantic. The windswept bluffs tumbled beneath a grey lighthouse painted ochre as the sun set over the bay. Late evening out on the deck of the cottage, a bottle of champagne for Ciri’s twenty-first, and Yen saying _sing us something then, songbird,_ and Jaskier not waiting to be asked twice.

8\. Maine. A rented cabin on a quiet cove, the air mild even at the crux of summer, the ocean lurching over the rocks as clear and cold as ice. Driving the company car up the bald summit of a mountain to sit amongst the shaggy heather while Jaskier fingered wild blueberries from the mossy spans between boulders and shouted _catch!_ to toss them to Geralt’s open mouth. Water frothing white around the rocks while Jaskier stood out on the shore, thin as a shadow, still as the grave.

* * *

It wasn’t until they were crossing into San Francisco city limits under an evening sky spread with lavender tendrils of clouds, the wheels singing along the twisting overpasses, that Jaskier said, “I grew up here, by the way.”

“You’ve never said,” said Geralt as he merged north toward the last delivery of the day. He had two stops tomorrow and then would put up in the terminal for home time. He’d thought they’d do a leisurely drive down a winding, coastal highway. Maybe try to finagle a convertible from the lot attendants, rather than the usual drab sedan.

“Left it behind,” Jaskier said. “Haven’t been back.”

“You want to stay?” asked Geralt. “For vacation?” And Jaskier was quiet, as he so rarely was, all the way to the delivery and on to where they parked behind a warehouse for the night.

Geralt thought not to prod as they settled together into the sleeper bunk but then figured he had to.

“Jaskier?”

“Julian,” he said against Geralt’s chest.

“What?”

“That’s my real name. Dad’s Polish,” he said. “Jaskier’s the word for some yellow flower.”

“Fitting,” said Geralt.

“Mum met him while he was teaching at Oxford,” said Jaskier. “Posh motherfuckers. Moved here when I was just a baby.”

“They’re well-off then?”

“Fuckin’ loaded,” he said. “Have this house in the hills up in Pacific Heights. Hardly would call it a house though really, I mean, they’ve got this piano room that looks out over the bay. There’s-- what?” He had felt Geralt tense beside him.

“Your parents are rich,” said Geralt, slowly. A swell of anger rolled through him. Jaskier’s parents were well-off, were beyond well-off, were living up in one of the most luxurious neighborhoods in one of the most expensive cities in the country while Jaskier was-- “You didn’t think to ask them? For help.”

“For help with--? Oh. Oh Geralt, no. No way.”

“Why not?” Surprised to find himself gritting the words out between his teeth. “Why the hell not?”

“You don’t know them,” said Jaskier. “I haven’t spoken to them since I was nineteen. ” His brow wrinkled. “You’re angry. Why?”

“Because you--” He didn’t know why he was angry.

He looked at Jaskier lying beside him, the sunset casting a warm glow through the porthole at the back of the sleeper that spilled along his throat, the collar of his shirt. Geralt lifted a hand to touch, rubbed a thumb along the smear of light on his raised collarbone. Jaskier’s lips parted with a breath, and Geralt wanted to kiss it from him, trap it somewhere to keep safe inside his own breast.

He didn’t know why he was angry, but the soft look that crinkled the edges of blue eyes said that Jaskier did.

“I guess I could go see them this week,” he said. “Couldn’t hurt.” A lie, Geralt knew.

But if Jaskier’s wealthy parents could pay for the meds, for treatment, even for some end to his life more comfortable than the one Geralt could give him, then the risk of pain might be worth it.

The weather didn't cooperate for a proper beach vacation, but Geralt was grateful for the sinking fog along the coast that hid the way he tucked his face into Jaskier’s hair, muffled the hitch of his breath as they stood out together before the obscured bay, Jaskier’s chest to Geralt’s back, gripping one another.

They waited until the very last moment, due back at the terminal before the end of the day, to drive up into the gleaming hills above the city, white mansions standing in jutted slants along the steep roads. Geralt pulled alongside a Victorian monstrosity, parked the car, waited there while Jaskier, looking like a boy, stole across to the front door.

He was not long in the house before he returned, tucking himself back into the car beside Geralt. He shook his head and Geralt didn’t have to ask how it had gone and they drove down to the terminal while Jaskier held himself still through the tears that spilled down his cheeks, shaking on the line of his jaw.

“Fuck!” he shouted suddenly into the wind blowing across the parking lot. “Fucking hell, this is so garbage.” He rubbed at his cheeks with the back of his hand, drew an unsteady breath, and swore again. Geralt didn’t know what his parents had said but felt the cruel and bitter aftertaste of it anyway. He wished he hadn’t asked Jaskier to go and see them. He wished the earth would take to trembling and that big, white house would fall down the hill into the sea.

“I’m going to blink out of the world like so much fucking nothing and not even have anything-- not even _made_ anything that lasts. No one’s even going to remember. Just some blip of a one hit wonder.”

“I’ll remember,” said Geralt. “I’ll never forget.”

Jaskier, face flushed pink from the shouting, stepped up close to him in the shadow of the rig. He cooed and smoothed his fingers down the wrinkles at the corner of Geralt’s eyes, slender palms tucked along his jaw.

“Oh honey, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s all kinds of goddamn tragic.”

“You’re worth remembering,” Geralt said, and he repeated it all that night in the warm nook of the sleeper bunk into the skin of Jaskier’s shoulder, the hollow of his armpit, the swell of his hip. _Worth remembering, worth remembering._

He ached with the fear that he would forget even an inch.

* * *

Geralt knew that he loved Jaskier as he watched him step barefoot into the chilled shallows of Lake Michigan somewhere outside of Gary, Indiana. It was their first shared week of home time. He wore his jeans cuffed up past his ankles as he toed into the water, yelping with the cold. Geralt stood back a ways up on the edge of the dunes, reluctant to shuck off his boots.

The beach was a piddling strip of grey sand, the chugging smokestack of a steel mill across the way doing it no aesthetic favors. The water was not yet warm enough to swim, hardly tolerable to wade through, and when a wave rose up to wet the cuffed denim of his jeans, Jaskier cursed and hurried back up the beach to Geralt, his arms folded against the wind off the lake.

He was pink-cheeked, bare arms gone goose-pimpled and pale, but his eyes were bright and he was grinning all crooked and charming. It would have been easy, then, to snug an arm around the smaller man’s shoulders as they walked along the sidewalk back to the motel, but instead Geralt just let their elbows bump and their stride even out to the same cadence.

Geralt knew that he loved Jaskier five years on as he watched him pick his way out onto the rocks behind their rented cabin just outside of Bar Harbor, Maine. Low tide made the isolated lip of coast into a sharp bank of sprawling boulders and tide pools. Geralt stood on the edge of a porch framed by shaggy balsams, minding that their lobster pot didn’t boil over. In the cabin, there was a blueberry pie bought from a roadside stand that they’d eat later hunched by the wood stove, and they’d go on to bed together with a moth-eaten quilt pulled snug to their chins against the chill.

Geralt thought maybe they could come up this way next winter and rent another place like this one, burrow down under the snow and make love all season before a roaring fire.

He watched as Jaskier stepped up onto a shelf of rock and paused there, looking out at the light flickering over the rippled backs of the waves along the cove.

It was their last shared week of home time.

The fading sun slipped a touch of gold into Jaskier’s hair.

* * *

Jaskier started up a cold as they crossed the border into Colorado, and by the time they hit Denver, it caught in his chest and rattled.

He’d hardly been sick their whole time on the road, sniffles here and there, a cough that lasted longer than it maybe should have, a few times shivering with fever in the passenger seat, swearing he was just fine, they didn’t need to stop anywhere. But it was rare enough that sometimes Geralt started to think _maybe somebody got something wrong, maybe he’s ok, maybe this will all be ok_.

But in Denver, he bent from the truck at a filling station and hacked with wet coughs, hardly pulling in air, and Geralt swept back his damp fringe to find his forehead scalding to the touch and he drove across the flat, brown stretch of the city until he hit a hospital parking lot, and it wasn’t just the altitude that tightened his chest.

Geralt barely heard or understood the doctor’s explanations of viral loads and opportunistic infections. Didn’t matter.

Jaskier shrank in a bed, breath clouding the cup of his oxygen mask. Geralt saw the ways his cheeks had grown hollow, his clavicles sharp. He had seen on the road as well but never let himself look too closely. He didn’t want to remember the darkening under his eyes, the thin bones of his wrist.

He could close his eyes and see him sprawled on his belly in the sand, dozing in sunlight. The flushed round of his freckled shoulders, the boyish curve of his chin.

He didn’t close his eyes. Folded his hand over Jaskier’s long, pale fingers resting on the blankets.

Jaskier slept half the day and woke in the evening, his breath still rattling but calmed enough he could slip off the mask to talk.

“Dying of consumption a suitably romantic way to go, you think?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt didn’t answer. Swept a thumb across the back of Jaskier’s hand. Tried to ignore the sharp feel of the fine bones there.

“Doctors said you’ve had it a while.”

“Been hiding the cough,” said Jaskier with a chapped-lip smile.

The coughing started again then, liquid and ugly, and he slept fitfully through the night, Geralt not at all. The doctors bent to say things about his immune response, his lung damage, his secondary infections. Said it could be quick or drag on for weeks. Geralt didn’t know which to pray for.

In the morning, the sky bled crimson across the horizon, and Jaskier turned to him and broke the quiet hum in the room.

“I think I’m going to love you for all time, darling,” he said, voice croaking. “To the end of the world.”

“Me too,” said Geralt. A rushed whisper, hardly audible, not trusting himself with more volume, but it was ok. Jaskier already knew.

Geralt lay his head down on the edge of the bed, and Jaskier’s fingers found the grey tangles of his hair and soothed through them. He didn’t quite have the breath to sing, but he tried anyway, a faltering lullaby that rose over the mountains.

* * *

That fall, he drowned, lulled quiet by pain meds.

Geralt kissed the weak thread of his pulse as it faded into stillness.

* * *

“Come home, Geralt,” Yen said over the phone, her voice breaking. “You don’t need to be out there on the road alone dealing with this. Come on home.”

“I _can’t_ ,” he grunted into the cradle, breath stilted with grief, and what he meant was _my home is where he is_.

* * *

In the fall of ‘96, almost ten years since he’d picked up a hitchhiker on some New England highway, Geralt found himself near Baltimore. Had some spare time between pickups, so he parked his rig in the terminal and took a cab out to DC. Strode out into the sun across a patchwork lawn laid out with shifting colors.

He’d never felt like he belonged at other memorials, never stayed long. Last one he’d been to was some event at a bar in Provincetown, filled to the brim with people Jaskier would have got on well with, all huddled around holding onto each other, vibrant and loud and steadfast in a rousing kind of grief, all sequins and boas and iridescence. Geralt was not as brave or bright as them, just a quiet, worn face in the crowd.

He walked until he found what he came for.

Stitched along the edge of a bright-colored square was a three by six stretch of fabric. The size of a grave.

He wasn’t an artist. He couldn’t sew, couldn’t write poetry, couldn’t hardly draw a stick figure.

But Ciri was working as a civil rights attorney out of Boston, had just moved into a new house with the painter she’d met in college, and he’d stopped into town to meet them for lunch. Ciri had redone the kitchen backsplash in fresh white tile since he’d last visited and painted the walls a baby blue and hung sheer curtains over the windows and the two women sat elbow to knee pressed together at the little breakfast nook, bent over a pad of paper, designing Jaskier’s scrap of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Ciri’s partner, a dark-skinned woman wearing yellow overalls that hung off one shoulder, held a pencil against the little pad, sketched a neat rectangle. _Size of a grave._

“What was he like?” she asked him. “What was he all about?”

Geralt stood beside the little block of fabric draped on the lawn of the National Mall. Its background shimmered an emerald green, the fabric wrinkled somewhat by the wind along the field. From the green rose the gold heads of a dozen or so dandelions, their petals stitched in gold thread, their toothed leaves in pale green. Front and center, larger than the rest, sat the tuft of a flower gone to seed, its round head scattered by the wind.

 _’So long, songbird.’_ read yellow block letters beneath it and then in jaunty cursive, _’Jaskier’_ and below that _’1948-1990’_. No thread spared for the name he was born with, not a part of this history.

 _What was he all about?_ she’d asked, and Geralt had looked at his hands folded together on the table, looked until his knuckles blurred. He didn’t have the words for what Jaskier was, never had.

He stood there a long time, a hunched figure in frayed denim with hands shoved in his pockets. Some years on, it would start to feel less like some great, dark thing wrenched apart behind his ribs every time Geralt thought about it, but not then. With the pieces of that great and terrible quilt stretching out for yards and yards around him, something tender and choking rose up in his throat.

 _Jaskier would be remembered._ If by him alone, so be it. Though it was heavy, he’d carry the memory on with him. It ached like a promise he had never quite put into words.

After a time, he turned from the little scrap of fabric and headed back the way he came. Rode back to the Baltimore terminal with the sky gone crisp and blue above the city.

In the lot, he pulled himself up into the cab of his rig. Twisted the sterling band on his ring finger. Reached to touch the little, yellow charm that hung from his rearview mirror, a buttercup held in resin.

Geralt put the truck in gear and pulled out onto the open road.

**Author's Note:**

> if you feel as personally aggrieved by this story as I was, yell at me about at [limerental](limerental.tumblr.com) on tumblr. i hope i was able to do the story some small justice.
> 
> also, if you'd like it, here's a link to donate to the [aids memorial](https://aidsmemorial.org/donate/make-a-donation/) which is doing good work making sure our history is not forgotten
> 
> now with [a playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5bK24N8XXNtbzCiUCXNpW0?si=MErdOpf-Tf-USn1fYyaUSg) where every other song is a sad 80s love song for extra pain


End file.
